The Story of The Salt-Box House
Yesterday I read The Salt-Box House by Jane de Forest Shelton. A book written by someone charmed by her own topic, especially when it is a history, is always beguiling, but when written about one’s own heritage, with family papers, ledgers, journals, heirlooms, and letters to draw from, as well as personal accounts of stories handed down through generations, the resulting history not only beguiles, it enchants. The Salt-Box House is a gem, a perfect composition of the social and domestic history of one area in Connecticut in the hills west of New Haven. Told as the story of one house, with the house beautifully brought to life with human characteristics of generosity, hospitality, and at the end, resignation, this book traces the history of the Shelton family. We hear about the daily life of the branches of this family spanning over one hundred years from the early-eighteenth century through the mid-nineteenth. The first decades were ones of growth, continuity and stability (even through the Revolution), and the final decades witnessed rapid changes and the beginning of the end of the Salt-Box farms and villages of New England. Published in 1900, the book reads easily still today; I devoured it with pleasure and interest. The book was reissued by Rvive Books, the same imprint that reissued The Sun Field by Heywood Braun, and again I offer my thanks and gratitude to them for making these wonderful books available.
The Salt-Box House is fascinating for its details, ranging in everything from the specific materials, tools and techniques that built the title house to what was eaten and from what kind of plates and cutlery to wedding trousseaus, school curricula, the role of the slave in the New England households of the time, the aligning of loyalties during the Revolution, the flowers, plants, and shrubs of the house gardens, the pastimes of children, summer and winter, the foods enjoyed, the friendships between kin and neighbor, the inoculations for small pox, and all the daily minutiae of life. The lives documented were not easy in terms of work required to eat, clothe, and house a family, but Shelton conveys the ease of time that has since been lost: there was no pressure to be somewhere or get something done at a certain time, and there was ample help, through slaves and the community of neighbors, as well as sharing of resources. (It is interesting that for the colonialists “[i]njustice in any form was deplored, mentally resisted” and yet slavery was accepted and unquestioned until after the Revolutionary War and even then, persisted for decades). The seasons rolled along and were planned for, and at times hard to survive, but all was endured.
The Yankee “Can Do” spirit pervades this entire book: no matter what had to get done, it was done, no matter what the “it” was (house raising, child bearing, burial, or afternoon tea), and there was no complaining about the trouble “it” might cause but instead a pervasive gratitude for having “it” in the first place. The only material that seems to be missing from this history are occurrences when the social code broke down. There is mention of the stocks on the Green but no mention of them ever being used, no hint of trouble with the law or any neighbors or black sheep relatives. The picture Shelton presents is that life, while difficult, was ordered and secure. A part of me wondered if that could have been so consistently true.
There was little in terms of culture available in this part of Connecticut at the time, no theater or music, other than hymns in church, and most of the reading was religious-oriented. There seems to have been a grand affection for Milton’sParadise Lost but most of the reading was of a much dryer tone. Social life occurred on Sundays in shared lunches at church although there were also tea parties and dances, planned for the meeting of young men with young women.
The final chapters of the book concern the last occupant of the Salt-Box house, Miss Mary. Having come to the house as a little girl when her mother came to care for her aging parents, Miss Mary never married and never moved from the house, although in her youth she enjoyed trips to New York City on her father’s sloop (a journey down the Long Island Sound and through Hells Gate into the East River that could take “ten hours or ten days “ depending on the weather) and in her later years she loved to travel around to the fancy resorts of the Northeast. These chapters are full of sentences drawn from Miss Mary’s journals and letters, and are evidence of her great wit, her deep understanding of the area and its people, her love for the house, and her contentment in being unmarried, unfettered, and free to do what she wanted to do. She had particularly funny observations to make about the widowers that came sniffing about, looking for a maid — whoops, wife — and about marriage in general: “Lotteries in this state are illegal. Marriages are said to be lotteries, therefore, are marriages illegal, I wonder?”
When Miss Mary dies, the house itself seems to stoop and lower itself, as if to a grave: “the old house sinks more and more into the lap of Earth, while the moss thickens on the low picket-fence, and the grass crowds over the edges of the narrow stones that led up to the faded green door.” We were there when the door was freshly painted for a new wife, the walls painted red, and the path stones laid down. After all the activity the house has seen and all the family it has sheltered, its rest down into earth seems quite right and natural.
The telling of such specific and particular histories as The Salt-Box House is so very important to understanding human history and the width and depth of human experience, endurance, and joy. No matter that the story of this house is so circumscribed in area and time: to read this book is to be grateful for being human, for being a part of all this living and loving and building. To paraphrase Wendell Berry from his novel Hannah Coulter, reviewed on December 31, 2008 and cited by the editors of The Salt-Box History, it is this knowledge of our history, whether it is shared or not, that will “make us a community again.” Even in our current world of global awareness, we are too rarely made aware of the particular dimensions of discreet places. By being made aware, we can discover those human traits that we all share, without resorting to religious or ethnic identities. Perhaps we can even learn to abide by what we share, and tolerate the differences.
In the preface to her history, Shelton suggests that not all progress is good, although it is inevitable and the past irretrievable. She writes: “All life in the primitive days of our country had its hardships, its trials, and privations, but it had also its amenities, and although To-day would not willingly change places with Yesterday, it is quite possible that Yesterday would not change with To-day.” After reading her delightful and full history, I would enjoy the chance to live, for just one easy summer day, the life of the old Salt-box houses.
